Posted:29th Dec 2010I've been working with fire fans for about a year now. I use Fire by Riz's Geisha fans:

http://www.firewhip.com/fans.htmlbr>As you can see, the fans are rather heavy (18 oz each) and they have a spinning ring, but it is rather large and embedded within the triangle of the fan's grip. I am a female of small-to-medium size. My arm muscles are well-developed so I have very little trouble with big extended arm movements like weaves/vortex/corkscrew/waves/claps, but I suppose my hand muscles are lacking because I do have trouble with control over finer movements, especially spinning.

My main problems with spinning are: difficulty keeping a flat plane and difficulty maintaining or controlling speed. I'm not entirely sure what the problem is, but I have some ideas. One is that maybe the rings are too large - they are wider across than my first three fingers, so I often have the problem that when spinning instead of the inside of the ring being in constant rolling contact with my fingers, my fingers are constantly "bouncing" off the insides of the ring which after too many spins seems to contribute to a jerkiness and messing up the plane so I can only do a few rotations before I have to stop because they start to look sloppy. I also have to use my thumb to spin in the plane in front of my body (so it's spinning towards the left or right instead of spinning towards my body). This especially causes problems when I want to do something like moving my arms in big gestures (like tracing a circle or square in front of my body) while doing finger spins, because the movement of my arms throws the finger spins out of their plane as the fans bounce around my thumbs.

I also have difficulty starting a spin without a forearm movement, with the spin starting out fast and losing speed each time it goes around. I haven't ever found detailed or clear instructions on finger spinning and I'm self-taught (never worked with another fan user in person), but some things I have read suggest other people are somehow accelerating and braking with their fingers/palms alone. Can someone please explain this to me? Because of the need to use a small forearm movement, I'm unable to do the seemingly never-ending spins at continuous speed such as Grimm does is in amazing fire fan chuu chuus video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLqvGI7fDrU). Instead my spins constantly have to be re-started with a new forearm movement, and something like a buzzsaw becomes impossible.

Is this just a simple case of my hands not being strong enough for the weight of my fans, or am I missing a critical technique/performing the moves wrong?

The video quality is never good enough and the moves are always so fast, that I can never quite tell what folks are doing with their fingers when they do those endless spins, but they seem to be doing something! Help!

Posted:30th Dec 2010Hi Belisamafan,A lot of words could be written as an answer to your questions, and a lot things could be explained =)But before, I would like to ask you, do you ever heard about www.homeoffans.com ? It's a site about fire fans, where you may find many thing like tutorials, moves and articles about fans.I'm asking because I'm sure that you would better to familiarize with this site and the information on it at first and something will be clear for you.And may be it's better to ask this question on our forum. I'm not trying to say anything wrong about homeofpoi, but I know for sure that very few of good fan spinners coming here =)Because they are Russians =)))Good luck!